By age 21, George Harrison's artistic influence was so huge that he managed, through the purchase of a single guitar, to inspire the creation of a whole new sub-genre of rock music.
In early 1964, soon after the Beatles had stormed up the American pop charts, Harrison took delivery of an electric 12 string guitar, then a rarely used instrument. Intrigued by its chiming, cascading sound, he used it on the sessions for the soundtrack for the Beatles' first movie A Hard Day's Night.
When folk musician Jim (later Roger) McGuinn saw the movie in a New York cinema soon after its release a few months later and heard Harrison's crashing chord that begins the title song, he knew he wanted to be in a rock band and that the band had to sound like Harrison's guitar.
Thus was born one of the biggest American bands of the 1960s, the Byrds and a host of latter day imitators of its 'jangly' guitar based approach, including Tom Petty and REM. And all because George Harrison changed guitars.
Harrison's greatest stroke of luck - finding himself in with two of the most outstanding songwriters and musical innovators of the 20th century in John Lennon and Paul McCartney - also worked against him getting his due as a musician and composer.
Bing Crosby once asked rhetorically why, if a singer as good as Frank Sinatra came along only once in a lifetime, it had to be his lifetime. Harrison, who wrote a clutch of brilliant, heartfelt songs - "Something", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "All Things Must Pass", "Here Comes The Sun", "Photograph" - could well have asked the same thing about Lennon and McCartney.
As the Beatles' lead guitarist, Harrison's solos on the band's early records were often perfunctory and fumbling.
Almost invariably on those records, each solo would begin with either McCartney or Lennon inserting a vocal whoop both to urge Harrison on and to cover up for his lack of technique. The singer Elvis Costello, a devoted fan and later a collaborator with McCartney, once told me that one of the fascinations of the Beatles' first three albums was "waiting for George to mess up".
And yet, as a teenager Harrison worked assidiously on his instrument. A collection of early live performances, mostly cover versions of band favourites, recorded for the BBC and released on CD in 1994, reveal Harrison as a truly capable rockabilly guitarist, faithfully reproducing the licks of his heroes Carl Perkins and Scotty Moore.
Appropriately, his best original guitar solo of all the early Beatles work was one in the style of Perkins: his joyous, country flavoured contribution to McCartney's "Can't Buy Me Love".
Never a virtuoso - the one virtuoso guitar work out on a Beatles song was played by his friend Eric Clapton - Harrison's approach to the guitar was in keeping with the Beatles' dominant ethic: that it always worked best as an ensemble aimed at producing a 'group' sound.
In the late 1960s, he developed an identifiable solo style using a bottleneck slide and high pitched, tightly modulated notes, which reached its apogee on his first post-Beatles hit "My Sweet Lord". He even lent the sound to other acts. While producing Badfinger's hit "Day After Day" in 1971, Harrison contributed the song's most distinctive feature - its slide guitar solo. Around the same time, he performed the same favour for Lennon on the latter's excoriation of McCartney, "How Do You Sleep?".
Harrison also developed a style of intricate chordal playing, first revealed on the coda of "Badge", the song he wrote for Cream with Clapton in 1968, that found its way into a number of later works.
Similar progressions appeared on "Here Comes The Sun" and "You Never Give Me Your Money" on the Beatles' Abbey Road album and on "It Don't Come Easy", the 1971 hit he produced for Ringo Starr.
By the time Harrison had reached 30, in 1973, his big artistic statements had already been made. The songs for which he would be best remembered had been written, his distinctive guitar sound had been honed and defined.
Like the other three Beatles, Harrison managed to produce interesting, often unique work for three or four years after the band dissolved officially - the result of a powerful work ethic and lingering competitive spirit.
But by 1973, his confidence hit by the discovery that he had subconsciously lifted the melody line from the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for "My Sweet Lord", much of the fire went out of Harrison's music. He ceased to be an innovator, played safe with his composing and lost interest in his instrument.
His latter solo work, which appeared with decreasing frequency, was, like the solo output of his fellow former Beatles, patchy and rarely inspired. By the 1980s, Harrison volunteered to interviewers that he would gladly go for months at a time without even picking up a guitar.
For someone whose childhood obsession with the guitar had led him to become part of the most famous and critically acclaimed musical group in history, it was a declaration that the things that drove him to be "Fab" were well and truly behind him.
But while Harrison's artistic flame burned, fuelled perhaps most of all by the need to match his older and more acclaimed bandmates, he proved himself one of the true originals of popular music in the latter half of the 20th century.